Ric Riccardo, the famous restaurateur, at his place on Rush and Hubbard streets in Chicago on Aug. 8, 1936. Ric was a painter, dancer and musician and let his friends and hang and sell their artwork at the restaurant.

Ric Riccardo opened Riccardo Resaurant and Gallery in 1934 in a sliver of a space at Rush and Hubbard streets in Chicago. Tribune journalist Rick Kogan writes, "Ric's was in its time -- from the mid-1930s to about the late 1980s -- a remarkable gathering place for artists, writers, journalists, opera singers and movie stars, admen, drunks, scalawags and bon vivants, real and would-be. It was called the Montmartre of the Midwest."